Last night I debuted a 5 minute lightning talk at the WordPress Providence Meetup in front of an enthusiastic crowd of 30-40 locals with varying WordPress interest and experience. Entitled “That’s a WordPress Site??”, the presentation is a tongue-in-cheek, rapid fire debunking of 3 pervasive myths about WordPress: that it’s just blogging software (not a CMS), that it’s not meant for big business or enterprises, and that all WordPress sites sort of look the same.
All of the lightning talks were recorded, so we’ll hopefully have video of me engaging the audience with the slides sometime soon. The raw slides really work on their own as a 3 1/2 minute showcase, so I’ve published the slide deck – animation and all – in HD quality on YouTube for all to enjoy.
Today’s release of WordPress 3.0 brings some exciting enhancements and new features that strengthen the software’s position in the realm of content management systems. For developers such as us, two sets of features in particular should prove invaluable in implementing WordPress-based solutions for our clients.
First, version 3 expands WordPress beyond the traditional blogging constructs of posts and pages by allowing users to specify custom post types. These custom types can function either like posts, organized linearly, or like pages, having a hierarchical structure. This feature builds on the custom taxonomies introduced in WordPress 2.9, which let users expand the organizational options for content beyond just categories and tags. Now, combining custom post types with custom taxonomies, users have complete control over how content is organized and displayed.
Custom post types don’t just let users segregate press releases from product pages, for example, but also simplify the addition of fields specific to each post type. A product post type could include pricing and availability, whereas a press release could hold media contact information. Following this example, separate taxonomies can be assigned to each, reaffirming a clear organization of content.
Continue reading Introducing WordPress 3, Featuring Custom Post Types, A Native Menu Editor, and More
We are proud to announce the launch of KidSpirit Online, a non-profiit magazine and online community for young teens who enjoy writing, creating, and exploring meaningful subjects such as spirituality, values, and life’s “big” questions.
KidSpirit’s new website is powered by WordPress and BuddyPress.
Using WordPress as a publishing platform, KidSpirit Online now offers a more welcoming and secure environment for kids to interact with each other. BuddyPress powers the site’s social networking features, allowing young writers and artists to create groups and chat in forums. The BuddyPress registration process has been customized to comply with child privacy laws; comments, profiles, and other aspects of the site were all customized to protect personal information.
The project included the development of a custom avatar plugin that limits profile image selection to a handful of predesigned choices. The plugin integrates with existing WordPress and BuddyPress avatar functions to seamlessly display a users’ chosen avatar across the site, overriding both the Gravatar service and avatar features built into BuddyPress. This custom functionality prevents members from uploading their own images, ensuring child privacy and an appropriate environment.
The new site’s creative was designed by Mixit Productions and features a look that is colorful, kid-friendly and true to the spirit of the magazine.
C. Murray Consulting’s second post on Smashing Magazine, Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers, was published on the morning of November 25, 2009.
The original article covered 4 over-arching topics, and was so lengthy that the editors decided to split it into two parts! Part two – which focuses on customizing the administrative experience – will be published in two weeks.
Advanced Power Tips, part one, covers techniques for multi-block page / post content and digs deeper into methods for associating page content with post categories.
Continue reading Smashing Mag Redux: Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers
It doesn’t look much different than it did a month ago, but under the hood the most prominent website in U.S. government is now running the open source Drupal content management system. This apparently replaces an unknown proprietary CMS that was implemented during the Bush Administration.
On the heels of the high-profile Recovery.gov Drupal site launched earlier in the year, this is another big win for the Open Source community and an important stamp of approval for the Drupal system. Seeing a site with this level of prominence leverage Open Source technology will be noticed by governments and corporations around the world where Open Source has traditionally been looked at as not polished enough and not secure enough for mission critical operations. For direct web communications with the U.S. people, WhiteHouse.gov is about as mission critical as it gets.
Having worked through dozens of projects on Open Source content management systems, the government’s Drupal choice is not at all surprising. The evolution of the platform from it’s political roots during the Dean Campaign in 2004 is just extraordinary. Today, there is not much you can’t do on the platform with it’s robust developer API and with the thousands of modules contributed to the project by the community.
Although we don’t have access to all the specific Drupal modules in place (I’d love to see it), we did notice a few interesting tidbits via a look at the page source:
- Related blog posts appear to be handled by the Views module (no surprise there)
- The popular AddThis link sharing service is being used
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WebTrends is keeping track of your visits (Sorry, Google Analytics)
- The beautiful slideshow on the homepage is built with jQuery
- Contributed module Galleria is getting some use in the Photo Galleries
- And in case you were wondering, yes, the robots.txt file is still only two lines long, slightly shorter than 2,400 present during the prior Administration
Have you uncovered more details? Let us know in the comments. It’ll be interesting to see how this site evolves in the coming months and years knowing that Drupal is under the hood.
Update 10/26/2009 – More Open Source in government. The SEC’s Investor.gov site launched a few days ago on WordPress, our other favorite platform.
On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.
Read the full post on Smashing Magazine
The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:
Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.
Increasingly, savvy organizations are asking for web solutions built on open source content management systems. We’re all for it: we’ve built solutions on a variety of platforms, including WordPress and Drupal, both open source projects. We’ve even released a few open source plug-ins of our own.
Open source certainly offers benefits, including a transparency that we believe encourages better programming (“the best disinfectant is light”), the removal of the dependence on a single software vendor, and often times, incredibly low cost of ownership. All of that said, as advocates of custom solutions for clients with custom needs, we know that the open source solution isn’t always the right solution.
More importantly, we’ve found that savvy clients and prospects asking for open source are actually getting at something more essential: open platform solutions.
Continue reading Open source and open platforms: the questions you should be asking